Today's trans teaching:
"What I want to suggest is not that accounts of the archive’s absences are misguided per se but rather that we consider the extent to which theories of the damaged or incomplete archive are animated by a tacit injunction to historical recovery. Operative within this language of lack is, I think, what Arondekar has called queer history’s “seduction of access” and the concomitant privileging of recuperative reading practices. Even as queer critiques of the archive proliferate, and the turn to alternative archives becomes increasingly common, there remains a conviction that whatever it is that we hope to find can, in fact, be known—that it can do something for our narrative and political possibilities if only we can develop more capacious and oppositional ways to look [emphasis mine]. The critique of sexuality’s incitement to discourse has not, in the end, deterred formidable efforts to make a supposedly taciturn archive speak, and scholars (within and beyond historical studies) have continually labored at reading and creating the queer archive anew. As in Derrida’s account, the archive stands as a primary site of queer historical loss but also, importantly, of possibility. As such, the array of discourses that self-describe as critiques of the archive collectively emerges as a return to and reaffirmation of the archive’s ultimate promise. These discussions evince an apparent faith that if only the archive can be found or created, can be deciphered or coaxed into revealing our mystified pasts, then we will be able to claim our own history that restores."
— Abram J. Lewis. “‘I Am 64 and Paul McCartney Doesn’t Care’: The Haunting of the Transgender Archive and the Challenges of Queer History.” Radical History Review, no. 120 (2014): 13–34. This passage is from p. 17. doi 10.1215/01636545-2703697
The part I bolded is cited to Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 6.
